Offes paradox in the light of neoliberalism and its paradoxes: Schumpeterian workfare and Ricardian austerity

The chapter revises the author’s earlier work on the restructuring and strategic reorientation of welfare regimes in advanced capitalist social formations in the post-war period. It does so in five ways. First, it grounds the analysis in the contradictions of the capital relation, some of which can be displaced and deferred within given spatio-temporal horizons but nonetheless provide generic mechanisms that recurrently destabilize capital accumulation and social reproduction and generate crises. Second, it considers two exit routes from Atlantic Fordism in the heartlands of capitalism and suggests two forms of welfare regime compatible with these routes. These are the knowledge-based economy and finance-led accumulation, each of which has a corresponding ideal-typical welfare regime. Third, it suggests that, whereas the form of welfare regime associated with the knowledge-based economy may pursue conjunctural austerity policies and even a contingent politics of intermittent austerity, finance-led accumulation is associated with the emergence of an enduring austerity state. Fourth, it addresses the crisis-tendencies of financialized neoliberalism and its capacities for renewal in response to the North Atlantic and Eurozone financial crises and related crisis forms. Fifth, it considers this analysis in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for austerity. © Pauli Kettunen, Saara Pellander and Miika Tervonen 2022.